Myth as Philosophy: A Philosophical Study of How Indian and South Asian Myths Encode Worldviews, Ethics, and Cosmology

Abstract

This paper conducts a philosophical study of myth in the Indian and South Asian tradition, proposing the contemporary relevance of mythological texts like the Vedic hymns, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, as well as the living folk mythologies of various sub-regional populations. The paper aims to examine advanced philosophical systems, encoding cosmological, epistemological, ethical and anthropological insights of profound depth and contemporary significance. It will also explore the nature of myth not as a cultural phenomenon, but as what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur described as "a mode of being-in-the-world", a way of knowing the world that is not less but only differently serious than the systematic traditions of philosophy, differing from them only in method, medium and the nature of the relationship. The paper draws on the tools of phenomenology (Heidegger, Ricoeur), comparative religion (Eliade, Smith), mythology studies (Campbell, Doniger), Indian philosophy (Matilal, Mohanty) and postcolonial studies (Nandy, Chakrabarty), and is structured along six philosophical themes:

       I.          The nature of myth as philosophical discourse.

     II.          Vedic cosmogony as ontological inquiry.

   III.          The Upanishadic internalization of myth.

  IV.          Puranic ethics and the moral cosmology of karma and dharma.

    V.          The Epic tradition as philosophical narrative.

  VI.          And the folk myth as subaltern philosophy.

The paper contends that Indian mythology represents what can be called a "mythological philosophy" in which the narrative and the analytical, the symbolic and the logical, the experiential and the doctrinal are not discrete but held in productive friction with each other to yield insights unavailable to either pure narrative or pure systematic philosophy. It concludes with a sketch of a contemporary approach to Indian mythology that seeks neither to romanticize myth as arcane mystery nor to rationalize myth as primitive superstition, but seeks to recuperate Indian mythological philosophy as a living resource for contemporary cosmological, ethical, consciousness and humanist thinking.